Nick Gillespie notes that Peter McWilliams died ten years ago today. McWilliams was a resister of the War On Drugs. He was also one of its casualties.

McWilliams was very sick with AIDS and cancer, and the medicines he used made him nauseated, which he was able to ameliorate by smoking marijuana. The DEA charged McWilliams with various crimes in connection with a medical marijuana operation. Forbidden by the judge from mentioning his medical condition in court, he was forced to plead guilty and hope for leniency. While out on $250,000 bond for sentencing, and refraining from using marijuana as a condition of the bond secured by his mother's house, he apparently vomited and choked to death.

I only know of McWilliams through his amazing book, Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in a Free Country. It's a passionate cry for freedom, the simple human freedom to do what we want as long as no one else gets hurt. Go ahead and click the link. That's not an Amazon page, that's the entire book, posted online for free the way McWilliams wanted it.

This book has been a huge influence on my personal moral philosophy. I had already come to an intellectual conclusion that things like the War on Drugs were wrong, but I hadn't really internalized the idea. Then I read a section in Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do where McWilliams describes getting a ticket for a traffic violation and later getting busted for smoking marijuana. He points out that the traffic violation presented a genuine danger to his fellow human beings, but using drugs harmed no one other than perhaps the user, so despite what the cops and the legislature and almost everyone thought, the traffic violation was the greater crime. In fact, using drugs was no crime at all. I realized that this crazy idea was something I could believe. And it changed everything.

The other thing I remember about McWillaims is his astonishment at the types of people who fought on the dark side:

I write these things and feel myself in mortal combat with a gnarly monster; then I remember the human faces of the kind people who tried to make me comfortable with small talk as they went through my belongings as neatly as they could. Then I remember, painfully, that the War on Drugs is a war fought by decent Americans against other decent Americans, and these people rifling through my belongings really were America's best -- bright young people willing to die for their country in covert action. It takes a special kind of person for that, and every Republic must have a generous number of them in order to survive.

But instead of our best and our brightest being trained to hunt down terrorist bombs or child abductors -- to mention but two useful examples -- our misguided government is using all that talent to harass and arrest Blacks, Hispanics, the poor, and the sick -- the casualties in the War on Drugs, the ones that, to quote Leonard Cohen again, "sank beneath your wisdom like a stone." It is the heart of the evil of a prohibition law in a free country. After all, picking on someone with AIDS and cancer is a little redundant, don't you think?

On the way out, one of the DEA agents said, "Have a nice day."

I believe the comment was sincere.

I never know what to make of that. Oh, I understand what McWilliams was saying, and I think it's probably true. It's a mistake to think these people are stupid, and it's probably unhelpful to think of them as evil. But sometimes that just makes it all the more hopeless: How can these "decent Americans" not understand that they are hurting people for no reason?

Peter's gone now, but in his short time on earth he influenced a lot of people, and his ideals live on in so many of us. I wish he was still here to see some of it.

Happy Easter everybody.

Today's not really a great day for me. It was a year ago today that my mother died. The trouble actually started two weeks earlier when she went into the hospital. That's when she really disappeared. But today's the first anniversary of the day she died.

All in all, this is the end of a rough year for me. I lost both my parents, I lost months of my time, I lost some income, and I spent a lot of money I didn't have on things I suddenly needed. It was also kind of depressing, in the clinical sense. I know that depression can sneak up on you, but you know what? Depression snuck up on me.

I thought I was okay. A little sad and a little tired, maybe, but basically okay.

However, over the past month or so, as this anniversary approached, I noticed that I'm starting to take control of my life: Fixing things around the house, replacing busted backup disks on my computer, getting excited about my job again, bringing my personal financial records up to date (yikes!), thinking about taking up photography again...I'm even blogging more.

At the time, I didn't realize I was doing any of these things less, but comparing how I was six months ago to how I am now, it's pretty obvious that I went through a mild depression that seems to be waning.

(I say "seems" because, for all I know, in another six months I'll be blogging about how depressed I was now.)

Anyway, I just want to give thanks to everyone who stuck with me, both here in the blogosphere and in real life. I'm glad to have all of you in my life.

Veteran's Day always made me think proudly of my father. Now that he's passed on, it's kind of a sad day. I've got nothing else to say, really.

A while back, I wrote about my list of the giants of comedy and my list included Larry Gelbart.  Larry Gelbart is probably best known for writing and directing the TV series M*A*S*H, but he wrote for Sid Caesar on Caesar's Hour, which became Your Show of Shows, alongside the likes of Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner & Woody Allen to name a few.

He wrote the book (script) for the Stephen Sondheim musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. He also had great success in movies with Oh, God! and what I feel is one the best written comedies of my time - Tootsie.

He wrote a book (book) called  Laughing Matters: On Writing M*A*S*H, Tootsie, Oh, God!, and a Few Other Funny Things.  It's out of print, but if you can find it at the library or used bookstore, I highly recommend it.

Larry Gelbart died Friday morning after a long battle with cancer.  He was 81. The world is a whole lot less funny without him. Thankfully, we still have his comic legacy.

Nobel prize winning agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug died yesterday at the age of 95. If history is just, people a thousand years from now should still be talking about him. I wrote about him here.

My father, Burnett Draughn, was born in on Decoration Day, May the 30th, in 1919, somewhere near Daniel's Branch, Kentucky. He was Joe and Melissa Draughn's eighth child out of an eventual total of ten. My dad liked to say that he had nine brothers and sisters, and every one of them also had nine brothers and sisters.

Burnett is an unusual first name. His parents had named him after a local Baptist preacher who they must have admired. Not too long after my father was born, according to family legend, Burnett the preacher robbed the post office and took off for parts unknown.

My father grew up on a farm, where he did some horseback riding, took care of the animals, and sometimes had to go out hunting for the family's dinner. Squirrel mostly, to hear him tell it.

He went to school in Hindman, but later he was sent to the Pine Mountain Settlement School, a boarding school founded by philanthropists to help educate poor children in the mountains of southeastern Kentucky. I suspect it was a little bit like a modern youth home, except that it was in the Appalachian mountains, and that it was considered normal to teach troubled youths such handy skills as how to blow things up with dynamite.

When he was 17 years old, my father took off and lied about his age to join the Army. A couple of years ago, I saw some paperwork from the Veteran's Administration that still showed his birth year as 1918.

Burnett was a big farm boy and used to hard work, so the Army soon had him carrying a BAR---a Browning Automatic Rifle---which is a heavy .30 caliber machine gun. In addition to the usual reasons army units have machine guns, my father also filled the role of air defense. If they were attacked by enemy aircraft, he was supposed to try to shoot them down.

Later on, the Army found out he could ride a horse pretty good, so they sent him to a pack artillary unit in Panama, where the Army used horses to haul artilliary through the mountains. His unit did have one truck available, though. They used it to carry food for the horses.

My father mustered out and went home, only to join up again a few years later as World War II started. He was sent overseas, and I gather he arrived in Italy after the controversial landing at Anzio. Eventually he ended up with the 44th Infanty Division in France, chasing the German army through the Vosges mountains, which he remembered as being very beautiful.

(My mother once told me that my father's unit saw the Nazi death camp at Dachau, but he's never talked about it with me.)

After returning from the war, my father married Thelma Jean Chalk and they had a son named Burnett Lee and a daughter named Sue Jean. The marriage ended badly, and my father moved away.

In the early 1960's, Burnett found himself in Chicago, where he met a woman named Elizabeth Kielkiewicz. They got married, and by May of 1964 they had their only child, a boy they named Mark.

Through the years, my father has held a bunch of jobs. Among other things, he's worked as a truck driver, a salesman, and a security guard. During most of my life, however, he worked in the dockyards of various trucking companies---P.I.E., Terminal Transport, and American Freight Systems are the only ones I remember---loading and unloading trucks until he retired at the age of 67. That's a lot of hard muscle work. I remember he had a handshake like iron.

He mostly worked the night shift, which allowed my mother to work days without leaving me alone in the house, although I can remember a period where I had an hour to myself each day. I didn't get to see much of him, since he was rarely home for long when I got home from school.

We went on a few long driving vacations, mostly to Kentucky to visit the family---Louisville for my Aunt Mary Elizabeth, Pikeville for my Uncle Hagan and his children. I can remember long drives through the hills of Kentucky. One time we picked up a couple of hitchhikers, and another time we ran out of gas.

On one of the trips we were on a long stretch of open road, and my father decided to see how fast the car would go. He got our 1969 Plymouth Valiant up to an even 100 miles per hour. Just a few months ago, he told me that he realized this was not a smart thing to do---if one of our cheap street tires had blown, we'd all have died---but I told him it was a vivid and fun memory for me.

One summer we drove to Washington, D.C.---I remember we toured the Bureau of Printing and Engraving, the Capitol Building, the White House, and the FBI building. We were really impressed by the new subway system, which was much prettier than our own CTA. Of course, we returned home through Kentucky.

My dad enjoyed playing card games, and was something of a card sharp in his younger days. I remember long hours of he and my mother and I playing 500 Rummy around the kitchen table. He also like to play the horses occasionally, although later he switched to the state lottery.

My father was always looking to "work the angles" in any situation. This meant trying to figure out any tricks that could be pulled. He wasn't very good at tricking other people, but he was good at spotting other people trying to trick him. I remember one afternoon as a child when I had a friend over to play one of my games that used marbles. When we were done, as my friend was getting ready to leave, my dad came over and laughingly picked him up and held him upside down. Marbles fell out of his pockets.

After he retired, my father used to like to run errands around the neighborhood, stopping to chat with everyone he ran into. For a while he used to tell all the ladies that he wanted to give them a kiss, then he'd hand them a piece of Hershey's Kiss chocolate.

In recent years, my dad spent much of his time watching MSNBC and CSPAN. He followed politics a lot, and he was a life-long Yellow Dog Democrat: There were some Democrats he didn't like, but I never heard him say anything nice about a Republican. When I took him to the V.A. hospital, he would always ask me to turn his wheelchair away from the portrait of George Bush in the waiting area. I'm glad he lived to see the Democrats retake the White House.

Over the years, my dad had a few important pieces of advice: Don't buy cheap stuff because quality always pays off in the long run. Always treat every gun as if it's loaded, and never point it at another person unless you want to kill them. Don't let cops in the house unless they have a warrant. If you're setting off explosives with a burning fuse and they don't go off when you expect, wait a while before you go to check it out because the fuse may still be smoldering.

Only that first one has really proven useful.

When my mom died in April, I moved in with my dad to take care of him for a couple of months until we could find a nursing home. In May, just a few days before his 90th birthday, we took him to Norwood Crossing nursing home, located about 15 minutes from my house.

At the age of 90, he had some problems with his memory, his time sense was messed up, and he had a few crazy ideas. He wasn't all there, but he could hold short conversations, and if the subject interested him enough, he'd remember it the next time we saw him.

During the next few weeks, he started to settle in. He was eager to take physical therapy to keep walking. He was starting to make friends with some of the other residents, and he'd sing aloud to the ladies when they wheeled him through the hall.

In mid-June, however, he suddenly got much more confused. This change in mental state happened overnight, and the concerned staff sent him to the hospital. After a bunch of tests, his doctors found a restricted blood flow to part of his brain and said he'd probably had another stroke. There was nothing to do but send him back to the nursing home.

For a while, my dad was very agitated, but he began to settle down. Then he began to get too quiet, and by last Monday he was barely about to get up the energy to speak. On Wednesday night, my wife visited him, and she told me afterward that she had a feeling he didn't have long in this world. On Thursday, his daughter Sue called him, and he was barely able to talk. He told her he thought he was dying.

On Saturday morning he had breakfast as usual. He listened to his music for a while until the staff helped him sit up on the edge of the bed to eat lunch. Afterwards, they put him back down for a nap.

Around 3 pm one of the staff was in his room and noticed he wasn't breathing. Burnett Draughn had passed away in his sleep.

He too will be missed.

Scattered thoughts over the last few weeks surrounding my mother's passing.

• Keeping track of everything going on would have been so much harder without the internet and mobile phones.
• My dad was in a VA hospital, and my mother was in a private for-profit hospital. I don't think it's just libertarian bias that makes me like the private hospital much better.
• I completely lost interest in watching House while my mom was in the hospital. It hasn't returned.
• It was incredibly frustrating trying understand what the doctors were saying about my mother's chances. They hate to say there's no real hope, even when there's no real hope.
• The hospice workers, on the other hand, were very clear. It was a relief to be given a direct answer to a direct question.
• On my mother's last day, a hospice nurse called to tell me that based on certain signs, my mother was "actively dying." What a strange turn of phrase that is...yet obvious in its meaning.
• My mother died on the exact same day of the year as my wife's mother.
• My mother was quite vehement that she wanted no funeral or memorial ceremony. She stopped going to other people's funerals many years ago---she couldn't stand having to remember them all that way---and so she didn't want a ceremony for herself either. My wife and I are okay with her choice, but I think some of my mom's friends are a little disappointed. I can understand that. But I also know what my mother wanted.
• Empty funeral homes are creepy. I've seen way too many horror movies.
• When we were talking with the funeral director, she asked us if we wanted a notice in the newspaper. I thought about it---perhaps people who know my mother but weren't in her address file would find out about her if we put in a notice---but ultimately decided it wouldn't do much good. As it happens, my eulogy for my mother is the top result for her name on Google and Yahoo. I don't think a routine death notice could have done that.
• My mother died of pneumonia, probably caused by an infection. You don't catch infectious diseases from nowhere. You catch them from other people. Since my mother rarely left her home, she must have caught it from a visitor. I wonder which one of us it was.
• I keep stumbling over phrases like "my parents' apartment" and "mom and dad's place." That's probably going to happen for a while.
• I've had a few of those moments where I imagine my mom's reaction when I tell her something and then remember that I can't.
• Then there are those times where I remember something I was supposed to do for my mother but kept forgetting. Over maybe two seconds I go through feeling upset with myself for not doing it, then feeling relieved that it no longer matters, then feeling guilty that I felt relieved.
• When I moved into my parents' place, I was pretty careful not to disturb the operation of the household. I tried to always put everything back the way it was, and I bought the exact same groceries my mother had. I'm slowly realizing there are things I can change, such as putting pots and dishes on high shelves and buying gallons of milk instead of the half-gallons my mother could lift. I can also rearrange the couch cushions and leave the remote control wherever I want.
• We're starting to clean my mother's stuff out of the apartment. My mother had a lot of keepsakes, and it feels very wrong to contemplate throwing away things that she held onto for thirty or forty years. It's the most vivid reminder of her passing. I'll probably keep a few of her things for no good reason.
• It doesn't bother me that it's Mother's Day...but I'm glad all the Mother's-Day-themed commercials are over.

Today is Virginia Heinlein's birthday.  That's her, with her husband.  You may have heard of him. 

If the world was a fairer place, Mrs. Heinlein would be 93, today, and in good health.  A very nice woman.

Which reminds me of a story. 

So, there I was, pounding away at the keyboard, when the phone rang.  It was my daughter Judy's science teacher.

"Uh-oh," I said, and "hold one."  I knew I was going to need at least one cigarette, and probably a drink.  "What did she do now?"

"You're not going to believe this one."

It hadn't been a great year.  Homework hadn't been done, or had been 'lost'.  Classes skipped, authority constantly challenged -- well, that was okay, by and large, but . . . -- and then there was the series of excuses with my name signed to them, written in my style, and which I had nothing to do with.  Catch Me If You Can wasn't supposed to be a training film, you know.

"Okay.  Issue?"

"The usual.  Her homework is not in.  You're not going to believe her excuse this time."

I sighed.  "Okay."  Missed another connection at JFK?  Fifth grandmother died?  What?

"She claimed that she couldn't get to it this morning because she was too busy chatting online with Mrs. Heinlein.  Virginia Heinlein.  Robert Heinlein's widow."

"Well, she does have to do her homework, but, yeah, she was.  They do that pretty much every morning.  Mrs. Heinlein looks forward to it, she says.  I know Judy does; first thing in the morning, she gets to Instant Messenger and they talk for awhile." 

Long pause.  "Really?"

"Yeah.  She still has to get her homework done, but, yeah."

"What do they talk about?"

Asshole.  "Would you eavesdrop on Mrs. Heinlein's private conversations with a young friend of hers?"

"No, of course -- "

"Me, neither."

"I mean, I, err, well, but, sheesh, and . . . "

"I know."

He managed to get off the phone, not completing a sentence.  Understandable.  I got on Instant Messenger.  Mrs. Heinlein was on, and I ratted Judy out.

There was a long pause, and then . . .

May I still chat with her in the mornings?  I so enjoy our conversations.

Of course, Ginny.  (She had long before told Felicia and me -- among many others -- to call her "Ginny," and it was all I could do not to answer, "I'd be honored to call you Ginny, Mrs. Heinlein."  She was like that.)

Thank you so much, Joel.

My pleasure, Ginny.

Talk turned to other things. I think that was the day I told her my Pournelle story, and she told me about how she's made Jerry's jaw drop by opening her pocketbook.  (Other stories, for other days.  Remind me.)


Every morning after, when Judy would sign on to Instant Messenger, a message would pop up.

Judy, is your homework up to date?

Yes, Mrs. Heinlein.

Every morning.


Agnostic that I am, I don't have any strong opinion about life after death and such, but it would be kind of nice to think that maybe, somewhere, she's reading this and thinking fondly of me and my kid.

We surely are thinking fondly of her, and not just once a year, either.

So:  Happy Birthday, Ginny.  Please pass along my respects to the Man Who Traveled in Elephants. 

There are many people who helped out over the last few weeks.

I want to thank the nursing staff of Adventist La Grange Memorial Hospital, including especially Barb, Malou(?), Soon, Rose, and several more whose names escape me but who were no less helpful. I appreciate all the time you spent taking care of my mother and explaining things to me.

Thanks also to my mother's doctors, for doing what they could.

I especially want to thank one doctor, whose name also escapes me. She was an Indian woman from the pulmonology service who explained the advantages and disadvantages of putting my mother on a respirator. As a non-physician, making these kinds of decisions for my mother was like standing at a fork in the road and having to choose a path without knowing what lies in either direction. More than any other doctor, this kind and patient young woman drew us a map of what might lay ahead. I will be forever greatful for her guidance.

I also want to thank the kind people at St. Thomas Hospice---I remember the names Ellyn and Linda---for the kind and straightforward way they explained the dying process, and especially for making my mother comfortable at the end.

Thanks also to our friends Ken and Kelly and Charlie for taking care of my father while my wife and I were busy with so much else. Ken also gets credit for building the computer I'm using to stay in touch. Thanks also go out to Tom at the Home Instead senior care service for setting up some additional care for my dad on such short notice.

Thanks to Christie at the American Cremation Society, operating out of Rago Brothers funeral home, for taking care of all the final arrangements for a very reasonable price.

Thanks to all my mother's friends who've said such nice things about her, and thanks to all of you readers who left us such kind words in your comments here and on my Facebook page.

Finally, I must thank my wife Love Ann for seeing me through all of this. She has been a source of comfort and strength without which I would have crumbled. I would especially like to thank her for taking over, without my having to ask, the task of notifying our friends and relatives. I'm not good at talking to people under the best of conditions, and contacting so many people about such a painful subject would have undone me.

Elizabeth Draughn (Liz to her friends, mom to me) will be sorely missed.  She was a passionate woman.  Passionate about her son, her life, her beliefs and her friends.  I've made many calls on behalf of the family this week, notifying those near and far that Liz is no longer with us, and there is a consistent theme in the responses that I've gotten, "I'm so sorry, I loved her very much - she was like a sister to me."

Mom did that.  She inspired deep and sincere love and she gave it back tenfold.  She shared so many stories over the years.  Some of my favorites were stories that she told of her mother and father.  Her mother has been gone for about 30 years (maybe more) but every single time she spoke of her mom, it was with both a light and a sadness at the same time.  She loved and respected her mother and took care of her until her death (sometime in the 70's).  She adored her father.  He was clearly the single most influential man in her 86 years.  He has been gone for at least 50 (maybe 60 years).  He died suddenly and she was never able to get over the pain of losing him.  She spoke of his kindness, and felt his love and protection every day they were together.  To the day she died, she believed her father watched over her, and I believe it too.

She had fun.  As a teenager, she wore scandalous panty hose and red lipstick when it was thought that only fast girls did that, and boy did she enjoy telling me about how much fun it was!

I learned recently that she had her heart broken as a young woman.  It surely didn't keep her from loving again, stronger and deeper.  I do truly think that she viewed her son and the relationship that she had with him as the healing balm to several old wounds.  It became clear to me that by letting me into her life, she was - in a way - gifting me with her greatest love, her son Mark - my husband.

Her son was the light of her life.  They were truly partners in crime, in the sweetest sense of the word.  From her Mark learned that innate curiosity was a good thing.  His incredible thirst for knowledge and information, his desire to learn new and different things, all came from her.  She welcomed every opportunity to both teach him and to let him learn on his own.  He tells me stories that he would ask her "Mom, what is this for???" and she would respond "Look it up" or "Get a book on it from the library."  The difference between her reaction and other mom's is that she would then put action to words.  She would take him on adventures, to the library or bookstore or wherever they needed to go to get the answer.  Through her son, I was gifted with a small degree of that curiosity which has caused me to expand my horizons and for that I am grateful.

We didn't always agree and she was truly one of the most stubborn women that I've ever met.  The biggest argument that we ever had was, ironically, about her last wishes.  Mom and dad asked Mark and I to put together legal health and power of attorney paperwork that would allow us to be there for them when they needed a greater degree of assistance and they didn't want us to experience any difficulties when working on their behalf.  When it came time to discuss her final wishes, she said that she wanted to be cremated.

At the time (and even to some degree now) that seemed strange to me.  I've experienced quite a bit of death in my life.  My mom, dad, grandmother and grandfather have all passed.  I told her that I wanted to have a wake and a funeral (because that is what I've always done).  She was mad and said that she really wanted to just be cremated and have her ashes scattered over her father's grave.  I told her that we would cremate her, but that "You'll be dead, you won't know or care what I do and I want to have a wake when you die."

Let me tell you, you haven't seen pissed until you've seen 5'4" of pissed off 84 year old Polish woman.  Her words were something like, "If I can't trust you to accept my wishes when I'm gone, how can I trust you when I'm still living."  Boy-o-boy, did that hit home.  Round 1 to the little pissed off Polish woman.  I apologized and told her that I would fight for her right to leave this world in whatever manner she wanted.

So on Wednesday of this week, we are going to the funeral home to pick up the ashes of my beloved mother-in-law.  We will make every effort to follow her wishes to the letter.

Mom, I will remember you every single day for the rest of my life and I will never ever see chamomile tea, potpourri or pipe-cleaners without thinking of you with the same love that you showed me every single time we were together.

My mother was born Elizabeth Kielkiewicz on December 9, 1922, right here in Chicago, the only daughter of two Polish immigrants. She grew up during the Great Depression, remembered where she was when the Japanese navy bombed Pearl Harbor, was amazed by the moon landing, and saw the beginning and end of the Cold War, and the dawn of the 21st century.

A lot of things happened to her along the way. None of them are very scandalous by today's standards, but she probably wouldn't want me writing too much about them, so I won't. Besides, I'm sure I don't know even half the stories.

Sometime in the early 1960's, Elizabeth found herself back in Chicago, where she met a man named Burnett Draughn. They got married, and by May of 1964, they had their only child, a boy they named Mark.

(When she went into labor with me, my father had just returned from working the night shift and was sound asleep. Since the hospital was right across the street, she seriously considered not waking him because he didn't really have to be there.)

My oldest memory of my mother is from when I was a very small child, no older than three. I remember being on the couch and burying my head against her side where I could be warm and comfortable.

I remember one Christmas when I had received a chemistry set as a gift. For several nights afterward, mom and I stayed up late at night doing chemistry experiments and eating pizza.

Mom drove me to school every morning, then some evenings we'd go out to my piano lessons (which never took) or a movie or some shopping. We went to the library a lot and she let me get as many books as we could carry. Sometimes we'd stop at a magic shop and I'd watch them do tricks. She bought a few tricks and taught me how to do them.

Mom drove our 1969 Plymouth Valiant. It was a classic grocery-getter when built, but by the mid-1970s the auto industry was making a lot of really bad cars, and its 225 slant-six was more powerful than the engines of a lot of new cars. My mom used to get a kick out of sitting at the light next to a new sporty-looking car and then punching it when the light changed, leaving them behind.

My mother had an extremely stubborn streak. On occasion, I may have overwhelmed her, or out-maneuvered her, and eventually simply outgrew her, but it was a rare day when I could change her mind about anything. Through judicious use of MTV (when they used to play music videos all day) I did convince her that rock-and-roll wasn't all noise. I think she liked the Eurythmics best.

She was stubborn with other people too. A few years ago, a couple of FBI agents knocked on her door, looking for information about one of her neighbors. She refused to let them in, yelling through the door that she doesn't let strangers into the house.

My mother worked for many years as a bookkeeper, back in the days before everything was computerized. I've been going through her finances, and they are very well organized. She kept the household cash in an envelope on which she wrote a transaction log explaining every instance where money was taken out.

Of course, my mom did all the usual mom things---cooking, laundry, and housekeeping---especially after she quit working. When my dad stopped being able to take care of himself very much, mom was his primary caregiver. She complained about it---she complained a lot---but she didn't want dad to go into a nursing home, so she took care of him right up until the day before she went into the hospital.

Mom went into the hospital on Saturday, March 21st and was diagnosed with congestive heart failure, poor circulation in her extremities, and kidney problems. A little later, they decided she also had pneumonia.

As she received treatment over the next week, she began to improve---her blood oxygenation got better, her heart rate settled down, and her kidney function returned to almost normal. By Monday the 30th, I was discussing rehabilitation options with the hospital social worker.

It was not to last. She took a turn for the worse, and by Wednesday morning, her doctors were asking me whether to intubate her. Based on her long-expressed wish that she not be "kept alive by a machine," we chose not to. By Friday, it was clear there was nothing that could be done, so we let them make her as comfortable as possible.

Elizabeth Draughn passed from this world on Saturday, April 4, sleeping peacefully in bed, with my wife and I holding her hands.

She will be missed.

I just noticed that Rogier van Bakel has a blogroll link to Peter McWilliams's free on-line version of his magnificant book Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in a Free Country. The premise of the book is simple:

This book is about a single idea---consenting adults should not be put in jail unless they physically harm the person or property of a nonconsenting other.

He calls laws that violate this principle "consensual crimes" rather than the more common "victimless crimes" because he feels the latter has too much baggage---from people claiming that it's a victimless crime to steal from a corporation, to lawyers pointing out that some crimes technically have no victims, to moral scolds who insist that "we are all victims"---whereas "consensual crimes" focuses on the key issue, which is the consent of all involved.

McWilliams goes on to elaborate on this idea for hundreds of pages. I could quibble with some of the details, but this book has had a strong influence on my moral philosophy. I think his main point is completely correct, and it continues to shape my beliefs about the proper goals and limits for our system of justice. Consensual crimes should not be crimes at all.

The experience of browsing through the whole Peter McWilliams site is a little spooky. It's got his books online, a short biography of Peter McWilliams, and even a place to sign up for his e-mail list. But there's one very important piece of information that doesn't appear anywhere on any page. This is a zombie site. Peter McWilliams has been dead for eight years.

In 1996, he was diagnosed with AIDS and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. The medicine he used to treat these diseases made him extremely nauseated, a condition he was able to ameliorate by smoking marijuana. During this time he became an outspoken advocate of medical marijuana.

Possibly as a response to that advocacy, the DEA arrested McWilliams and another man, charging them with various crimes in connection with a medical marijuana operation. Forbidden by the judge from mentioning his medical condition in court, he was forced to plead guilty and hope for leniency. While out on $250,000 bond for sentencing, and refraining from using marijuana as a condition of the bond secured by his mother's house, he apparently vomited and choked to death.

A memorial site for Peter McWilliams has this quote from his essay "Joy is Good":

In March 1996, I opened the door to death and stared the Grim Reaper in the face. There was a pause. Then he suddenly smiled and said, "Enjoy yourself! It's later than you think."

William F. Buckley eulogized Peter McWilliams as "a wry, mythogenic guy, humorous, affectionate, articulate, shrewd, sassy."

It's hard to imagine a more ironic death for such a generous spirit, a man who wanted so much for people to be free. It all sounds like some bad made-for-TV movie on the Lifetime channel. Some part of me thinks that Peter would probably appreciate the irony.

I've decided to link to Peter McWilliams's site under new blogroll category that will probably grow as I and my fellow denizens of the internet get older: Gone But Not Forgotten.

Although the category's purpose is to remember those who inspired us, enthralled us, and entertained us, it also serves a purpose in this case that Peter might not approve of. It is a reminder that Peter was essentially murdered by a bunch of drug warriors, and that the kinds of people who did that to him should also not be forgotten. Nor forgiven.

I never met Jim Berger. I don't even remember hearing his name before 9/11.

My wife used to work for the Chicago office of Aon Consulting. A couple of times, she visited the company's offices in New York City, and met a bunch of people there, including a Senior Vice President named Jim Berger. She liked him and thought he was a great guy.

The Aon offices in New York were located high up in the South Tower of the World Trade Center. They lost 175 people that day, including Jim Berger. When the first plane hit the other tower, he started evacuating his employees. Jim Berger was last seen in the elevator lobby, helping people get out of the tower.

Berger's favorite song was Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road." Springsteen heard about this and sent the Berger family a video of a special solo performance, which was played at his memorial service.

I didn't personally know anyone who died in the attacks of 9/11, so the fact that my wife knew Jim Berger is as close as I come to a 9/11 connection. I don't claim to have any strong feelings about his death, but when September 11 comes around, I end up thinking about him.

If any of Berger's family or friends come across this post, please don't take this the wrong way, but I wish I didn't have to think about Jim Berger.

This is strange and a little sad. From a Chicago Tribune report:

Someone broke into the Sept. 11 memorial near Naperville City Hall and stole a piece of concrete that had been part of the Pentagon, police said.

The theft occurred Wednesday, police said.

Naperville CrimeStoppers is offering a $1,000 reward for information leading to an arrest.

The memorial honors victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, including Navy Cmdr. Dan Shanower, 40, a Naperville native who was one of 125 people who died at the Pentagon.

I encountered the Dan F. Shanower memorial in 2005 and took a few pictures which I used in a memorial day post.

Though presumably accurate, the story is slightly confusing because it makes it sound like the thief broke into a building to steal the pieces of the Pentagon when in fact the memorial is outside and in the open.

Larger ImageDan F. Shanower Memorial

From the description, I think this is what they're talking about:

Larger ImagePieces Of the Pentagon

The little clear boxes contain fragments from the Pentagon. I guess someone broke open one or more of the boxes and stole the chunks of concrete from inside.

I imagine it was just some kid screwing around, but with a front-page article in the Chicago Tribune, it's probably drawing more heat than he expected.

Economist Milton Friedman has died at the age of 94.

Although the man was a huge influence on economic thinking, I never read much of his writing. My self-imposed education in the basics of economics came well after he made his major contributions, so by the time I encountered his writings, I had already learned many of his ideas from other sources.

The New York Times obituary for him is long but worth reading if you're interested in the recent history if economic thinking.

Back in August, I blogged about Lisa Ramaci-Vincent's response to Professor Juan Cole's suggestion that her late husband, journalist Steven Vincent, had been killed in Iraq because he was having an affair with his translator. She explained what her husband was really up to, and if you don't know the story, you ought to read it.

In additional to blogging the story, I also emailed her a brief note telling her that I admired her fortitude at such a difficult time, and expressing my sympathy for her loss. I wasn't expecting her to respond—she has a lot more important things to do than send out Thank You notes to online strangers—and I didn't get a response.

Until now.

Her email is about 400 words long and starts with an apology for not getting back to me sooner. She's been busy attending memorials for her husband and setting up the Steven Vincent Foundation. Then she thanked me for my note, expressed her hope that I've read her husband's book (In The Red Zone) and told me how much she misses him. She closes by asking me to spare a thought for Steven Vincent and his message.

I'm paraphrasing rather than just posting the message because I never told her I'd be posting the response. I wasn't expecting a response at all, except maybe a polite "thank you." I sure didn't expect a personal note. I'm a bit stunned by such graciousness.

Update: I asked Mrs. Ramaci-Vincent for some more information about the Steven Vincent Foundation and she tells me that it will aid the families of murdered journalists and stringers from the developing world. Unlike Western journalists, these people do not have large media corporations and life insurance to provide for their families if they are killed. In addition, the foundation will also help women living in dangerous parts of the world. She's still working on setting up a proper 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation and getting a web site up and running. Meanwhile you can find out a little more information at Kesher Talk, especially in the BlogAds to the right.

Glenn Reynolds has already linked to this, but it's an amazing story.

Independent journalist Steven Vincent was killed in Basra a few weeks ago.

Professor Juan Cole at the University of Michigan (who had previously been the subject of criticism by Vincent) looked into rumors that Vincent was having an affair with his female Iraqi translator, Nour Weidi, and suggested strongly that Vincent was the subject of an honor killing because of his ignorance of Islamic ways.

Now, Steven Vincent's American wife has set the record straight in a letter she's sent to several people. She really tears into Juan Cole in several places, but that's not the amazing part.

Read what Steven Vincent and Nour Weidi were really up to:

Oh No. Scotty died. 5:30 this morning.

James Doohan, the burly chief engineer of the Starship Enterprise in the original "Star Trek" TV series and movies who responded to the command "Beam me up, Scotty," died Wednesday. He was 85.

Doohan died at 5:30 a.m. at his Redmond, Wash., home with his wife of 28 years, Wende, at his side, Los Angeles agent and longtime friend Steve Stevens said. The cause of death was pneumonia and Alzheimer's disease, he said.

I never knew much about Doohan. I do remember noticing at some point that he seemed to have lost a finger. This article explains that he was in the D-Day invasion and was hit by machinegun fire.

He was thrice married and a father of nine, the last of whom was born five years ago when Doohan was 80 years old.

Asked if he ever got tired of hearing "Beam me up, Scotty" he said:

"I'm not tired of it at all," he replied. "Good gracious, it's been said to me for just about 31 years. It's been said to me at 70 miles an hour across four lanes on the freeway. I hear it from just about everybody. It's been fun."

As part of my new-found photography hobby, I was exploring the Riverwalk in Naperville, Illinois. It's a nice little park with lots of interesting walkways, bridges, and gazebos. It would make a great background for some outdoor portraits.

Just before I left, I spotted, across the river, what looked like a whole wall with faces carved on it. I thought that might make a nice background for some pictures, so I snapped a shot of it to remind myself it was a possible shooting location.

When I reviewed the pictures a few days later, I noticed something in one small area of the photo:

Is that an eternal flame? If this was a memorial of some kind, it would be disrespectful to use it as a background for a whimsical portrait.

A few days later, I went back to the Riverwalk and made a point of visiting the wall of faces. It was in fact a memorial, inscribed as follows:

Wall of Faces

Faces created by Naperville school children and molded by local artists to represent the casualties of September 11, 2001.

Here's a better shot of most of the monument area:

You can see the wall of faces, the eternal flame, and the central jumble of granite and steel representing the crumbled buildings.

I didn't pay much attention to the central figure of steel and granite, except to note several pieces of debris enclosed in glass:

The was apparently the real thing, some part of the World Trade Center or the Pentagon. I don't know if you can tell in this picture, but the scarred granite is clearly carved to look that way: It's not a piece of any of the real damaged buildings.

I then took a look at the twisted girder. An artist had bent it and cut jagged edges on it and leaned it against the carved granite to represent the fallen buildings. Pretty standard modern sculpture.

Until I stumbled on a detail that made me have to sit down:

This was no artist's detail. Artists add things to a sculpture because they have meaning. The warp of the beam, the jagged edges, the dings and dents, all these could be explained as an artist's representation of the battered building.

But why this? Why have this tiny, complicated, meaningless thing attached to the side of the sculpture? Unless it's not a sculpture.

This was the real thing. A piece of steel that was once part of the World Trade Center, then part of the burning pile. Consecrated by heroism and death, cut loose, and brought to this peaceful place in the quiet suburbs of Chicago to remind us all of the events of that day.

I found a sign that explained it. The beam is from the World Trade Center and the small debris fragments are from the Pentagon. That granite is quarried from Pennsylvania, "symbolizing the freedom fighters of Flight 93," which crashed in Pennsylvania.

There is also a placard, inscribed as follows:

Freedom Isn't Free

In memory of Commander Dan F. Shanower and the thousands of others who died in the attack on America on September 11, 2001.

Dan Shanower grew up in Naperville, attended Disctrict 203 schools and graduated from Naperville Central High School in 1979. He was commissioned a naval officer in 1985. He was killed at his Pentagon post, serving as chief of the Intelligence Plot for the Chief of U.S. Naval Operations.

These are his words: "...Those of us in the military are expected to make the ultimate sacrifice when called...the military loses scores of personnel every year...Each one risked and lost his or her life in something they believed in, leaving behind friends, family and shipmates to bear the burden and celebrate their devotion to our country...Freedom isn't free." (Naval Institute Proceedings, May 1997)

If you'd like more information:

• Cmdr. Shanower's full speech at the Naval Institute's web site.
• Shanower's page at Arlington National Cemetary.
• Messages from people who knew Dan Shanower.
• More about the creation of the Naperville Memorial.
• More about the dedication of the Naperville Memorial.
• A much better picture of the Naperville Memorial.